What’s the Plan Mitt?

Like most Americans, the economy is in my list of top concerns and I would prefer if things were going better. Both Romney and Obama claim that they have a plan to swing things around and it is likely that their ability to convince voters in this matter will have a meaningful impact on the election.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the case of Obama, I have a good idea of his plans and the likelihood of success. While there are various straw man attacks against Obama and some conspiracy theories regarding the employment data, the overwhelming evidence shows that the economy has been slowly recovering. At the top, as always, things are rather good. Corporate profits are high, taxes are low, and the stock market has been mostly positive. While the president’s impact on the economy can be reasonably debated, if there is an impact it would seem that Obama’s has been largely positive. After all, even the Republican narrative has changed from a tale of complete failure to the complaint that the recovery under Obama has not been dramatic enough. Naturally, Romney claims that he will be able to turn things around.

One of Romney’s main plans is to cut taxes by 20%, presumably in the hope that this will help the economy. As might imagined, the causal connection between tax cuts and economic recovery is a rather dubious matter. It mostly seems to be a matter of ideology rather than evidence-conservatives tend to swear by it while liberals tend to reject it. In any case, the economic crash took place after the Bush tax cuts went into effect and, of course, large corporations are very adept at not paying taxes-thus raising clear questions about the efficacy of tax cuts in this matter. As such, it would be unwise to infer that this plan will jump start the economy.

Romney has also claimed that his tax plan will not change the progressive aspect of the current tax system. The narrative against Romney is, of course, that he intends tax cuts for the wealthy while shifting the cost burden downward. Since the vast majority of voters are not wealthy, Romney needs to convince these voters that he will not be shifting the burden to them. By claiming he will keep the progressive aspect of the current system, he can claim that the burden will not be shifted. On the face of it, cutting taxes and keeping the progressive system in place seem compatible.

Most importantly, Romney has claimed that his plan will not increase the deficit. Given that his proposed tax cut would (if not offset) increase the deficit by $5 trillion, Romney needs a plan to prevent that from happening.

Romney has, of course, claimed that he will make cuts in spending. One specific example was that he would cut PBS’ federal funding. Since this would only cut spending by about $430 million, Romney would need to come up with much more in the way of cuts. While people are often quick to condemn the entitlements they do not receive, most people receive entitlements that they certainly do not want to lose. As such, it is no surprise that Romney has not laid out a detailed plan of cuts.

Romney has also claimed that he will close loopholes and eliminate deductions to offset the tax cut. He has not, of course, specified what loopholes he will cut or what deductions will be eliminated. This is politically wise of him-as with entitlements, many people have beloved loopholes and deductions (such as the mortgage deduction). Committing to eliminating popular loopholes and deductions, such as the mortgage deduction, would cost him votes and hence he is not committing. Rather, he says that the details will be worked out after he is elected-thus he is comMitting rather than committing. As such, voting for Mitt is voting for something of a mystery.

There is also the factual issue of whether or not closing loopholes and eliminating deductions would suffice to offset the tax cuts. While various scenarios can be considered, without knowing Mitt’s actual plan, the issue cannot be properly settled. Also of concern is the matter whether or not Mitt would be able to hold his ground against the addition of new deductions and loopholes (and the return of the old ones). As such, much that is important is also a mystery.

A final point of concern is to note that Romney seems to be claiming that his plan will result in no meaningful change. That is, the tax income will remain the same and the system will remain progressive. As such, one might wonder what the plan actually does.

But, you yourself just presented evidence regarding his chances of success. Plus, I am reasonable sure you have a pretty good idea about what Obama is likely to do. After all, we have his first term as a foundation for the inference.

Typical Mike. Numerous posts about Romney and questions about what he would do, what he should do, what he did do (that wasn’t to the Mike-o-mass likings) in the last 4-5 weeks. But try typing Benghazi or even Bengahzi into the search box on this site and you get zip/zero/nadda/nothing. But just because Mike has no comment on that issue but plenty on Romney (even when you can tell it’s not really him talking, but the DNC talking points), it doesn’t mean that he’s biased. It’s all so disingenuous, but that’s ok. He’s a philosopher dedicated to finding truth. Resume equivocating in 5….4…3…2…1

Obama could win. I don’t have your original prediction here, so I don’t know whether you wrote “he will be a one-termer” or “he’ll probably be a one-termer”. Keep rubbing your well-worn crystal balls; it’s not November 6, yet.

Norm=biomass. Biomass has expressed his discontent at me using the term “boy”, as in “Mike’s boy” as in, the President, when referring to Obama. Thus, his caricature uses the term boy, because obviously that’s what right wingers do, because “boy” must have racial connotations. At least that’s my assessment.

biomass/Norm: I do love a good challenge. Here’s an early prediction in 2009, on Mike’s blog. No hedging here:

Me: “One termer”

Mike: “I predict two terms and bet you one beer you are wrong.”

Me: “Well, I hate to hope he fails to make America better. I can only say that if his re-election is based off making our country stronger, than it appears our success is inevitable, as many liberals seem to think success is. Afterall, if Reagan made us better by doing the things he (and please, oh jaded leftists, please at least give Reagan some credit for doing that)and Obama is doing pretty much the opposite of Reagan, yet we still succeed. I guess success is inevitable.

If the unemployment does not drop below 6% in the next two years, he will be a one termer.”

Amid the Republicans’ alleged “war on women,” female employees in the Obama White House earn considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.

According to the 2011 report compiled by the White House, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).

Calculating the median salary for each gender required some assumptions to be made based on the employee names. When unclear, every effort was taken to determine the appropriate gender, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

Back in July 2010, President Obama declared, “Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income. And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole.”

On Wednesday, the Obama campaign lashed out at presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney for his failure to immediately endorse the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, a 2009 law that made it easier to file discrimination lawsuits.

The White House had no immediate comment on its salary differentials, and did not divulge if any Ledbetter suits had been filed on behalf of administration employees.

Mike denies it, but for some percentage of people it is all about the free stuff:

Despite numerous media outlets attempting to downplay the issue, Twitter exploded last night following the debate with new threats from Obama supporters to assassinate Mitt Romney if he defeats Obama in the presidential race.

As we reported yesterday, in addition to threats by Obama supporters to riot if Romney wins, innumerable Twitter users are also making direct death threats against Romney.

The primary reason given for Obama supporters wanting to see Romney dead is the fear that he will take away food stamps.

I remember Mike made a big deal of Ryan misremembering the time of a race he ran in high school. Biden just makes stuff up from when he was in the senate and Mike is silent:

During the vice presidential debate last week, Vice President Joe Biden seemed to significantly overstate his role in the 1983 negotiations over Social Security.

Asked about Medicare reform, the vice president said, “Look, I was there when we did that with Social Security in 1983. I was one of eight people sitting in the room that included Tip O’Neill negotiating with President Reagan. We all got together and everybody said, as long as everybody’s in the deal, everybody’s in the deal, and everybody is making some sacrifice, we can find a way.”

The comment would seem to suggest that Biden was one of the few, key players “in the room” working in a bipartisan way to reform Social Security.

On “Meet the Press” on April 29, 2007, then-Sen. Biden made a similar claim, saying he was “one of five people — I was the junior guy — in the meeting with Bob Dole and George Mitchell when we put Social Security on the right path for 60 years.”

But according to the historical record, Biden was not one of the small group of people in “the room,” or in “the meeting” — nor was he even a key player in reforms.

Those close to the Social Security reform process say that the chief negotiations were made between then-Sens. Bob Dole, R-Kansas, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., through the National Commission on Social Security Reform, which worked throughout 1982 on recommendations to help guarantee the solvency of the program, and conducted final negotiations in January 1983. The commission kept President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O’Neill, D-Mass., in the loop throughout the process.

President Reagan signed their work into law in April 1983. There were 15 members of the commission, including Dole, Moynihan, and two other senators; Biden was not one of them. Nor was he at the signing ceremony.

Norm. The plan is to reverse what has happened since 2000 in terms of economic freedom.

Economists James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall publish an economic freedom of the world report annually. Their latest report, released this week, shows that the United States, which was ranked the second freest economy in 2000, now ranks 18th. Economic freedom increased from 1980 to 2000 in the United States while it was generally ranked behind Hong Kong and Singapore as the third freest economy in the world. Today it ranks behind European welfare states like Finland and Denmark, and places traditionally more hostile to economic freedom like Qatar.

The declines in freedom have occurred because the federal government has grown larger and more intrusive. It has been a non-partisan affair. Approximately two thirds of the decline in economic freedom occurred during Bush’s presidency. But pace of decline doubled during the first two years of Obama’s presidency. In fact, the new index is based off of data from 2010. If the rate of decline has remained unchanged over the last two years the United States has already fallen to 40th and ranks behind places like Romania, Sweden, and Panama. Unfortunately the data needed to investigate that is not available yet.

The decrease in economic freedom has occurred in most areas of the U.S. economy. The protection of private property rights showed the greatest decline. The decline is likely the result of the increased use of eminent domain, the ramping up of the wars on drugs and terror, and the increasingly uncertain business environment where it is unclear who the government will bail out and who will be allowed to breech contracts. The growth in the size of government and the increased scope, and administrative burden of, regulation have also decreased our economic freedom. Inflation adjusted government spending has grown by more than 50 percent since President Clinton left office.

I am with you, T.J. I can hear all the liberals screaming about the need for more government regulations in light of the meningitis outbreaks. . Yes, thousands of pages of bureaucratic red tape may have saved a few lives, but it would have cut into profits dramatically. The people who died. Yeah, its too bad, but no different than getting run over by a drunk driver. They are just collateral damage.

I’m voting for Mitt Romney. Do I value profits over people? No. But I do value MY profits over people who are strangers. I am a multi-millionaire and I want to keep it that way.

TJ, I am a republican and I don’t want everyone to be wealthy. Such a proposition is an absurd impossibility. There is a finite number of dollars in the world (unless you are a democrat and simply print more). Not everybody can be wealthy. Sounds like communism to me. Are you a communist?

Bob–assuming you are in the U.S.–look around. We have gone a long way toward making everyone wealthy. It is only in the past couple of years that incomes have started falling. What do you think happened 3.5 years ago that could have changed things?

“am a republican and I don’t want everyone to be wealthy. Such a proposition is an absurd impossibility”

No, it’s not absurd. At least not in the sense of releative wealth over time as opposed to that in any instant. Poor people today are better off than the middle classes of 200 years ago. Like the Mike-o-masses, you don’t understand fundamental economics. I seriously doubt you are a Republican, and if you’re wealthy it is highly unlikely you worked to acquire that wealth. If you did, you wouldn’t be as economically ignorant as your statements make you out to be.

magus: I _could_ be quite a few characters, but Bob (because I’m not), or anon (because he hasn’t appeared in this discussion), or WTP. . .

I could even be you—on any one of the rare occasions that we see eye-to-eye. I definitelyl wouldn’t be you, when you get into your “spaghetti-armed metrosexual” mood , or when you’re rashly swinging your crystal balls around stating predictions as absolutes (Fukushima) when you should know better, or when you’re touting a guy whose claim about daily alcohol consumption is a flat out joke because he doesn’t adequately detail the many, man exceptions to his claims.

Arguing/ discussion from the opposing point of view isn’t that difficult. It’s being convincing consistently that’s hard. Ask any dead spy. . .

Sure, it’s not like his opponents would deliberately misunderstand his plan and lie about it to scare voters, right Mike? Why don’t you Google “Politifact Lie of the Year 2011″ to see how Dems behave in the wild?

On the one hand, I can understand the reluctance to be specific-given that a standard tactic is to make use of the straw man. On the other hand, politicians don’t really need specifics to lie and scare voters. They can just make up things-like a person being a secret Muslim socialist.

Also, the “I cannot say what my plan is because my opponents will lie about it” is a mere red herring.

I don’t know what lurks in his plan-after all, he will not specify the details in question. I can, however, infer that his people believe that revealing the specifics would be worse than not doing so.

It is not that I think that he has some terrible thing lurking in his plan. Rather, my concern is that I do not know what he plans to cut and hence cannot determine how his plan would impact me and other people. Before voting for someone, I’d rather like to know stuff like that.

Romney is cautious about making promises he may not be able to deliver on.

Does anyone remember how essential it was to close Guantanamo in 2008? And how candidate Obama guaranteed he would close it within 1 year? If he were a Republican, the press would be asking him about it.

magus71: Hmm. I thought you were in intelligence. No. Bob is not biomass2. I am not Bob. Unless, of course, I’ve become synonymous in your mind with anyone who has views other than yours? :(

I see talk here of wealth and relative wealth and I wonder : Who introduced this idea of everyone becoming wealthy? Let’s scroll up to TJ–

“Those evil Republicans want everyone to be wealthy, not just their cronies.” Bob, bless his soul pointed out that everyone becoming wealthy is little more than a sci-fi fan’s dream. Perhaps there’s some alien universe out there where all the wealthy people reside. Perhaps they’ve already visited us in their UFOs. Perhaps they have passed their secrets of wealth to the only group they feel qualified to carry those secrets to fulfillment: The Republican Party.

So WTP, bless his dark soul, enters to rescue TJ from his own statement with one of his favorite phrases: “relative wealth”, or in the even more general form “relative wealth over time”. And we’re taken back to that sci-fi issue of time. Spread out over the possible future of man, assuming we could predict that, chances are the changes in wealth that might be brought about by conservative non- specific plan of Romney are, possibly, if not likely, infinitesimal. How long will it take, ‘relatively’ , to bring a recently discovered tribe in the Amazon to the point of “wealth” (as TJ was using “wealthy” in that statement I quoted above?) or how long would it take to drag them forward to a degree of “relative wealth”? The phrase “relatively wealthy” could be applied to the kid in that recently undiscovered tribe who is a bit more wealthy than another child there. And so on, until we could say that same “relatively wealthy” kid is, like me or you, “relatively poor” compared to Mitt Romney, who is relatively wealthy compared to Warren Buffet.

TJ: Someone above asked you to provide some of the specific loopholes Romney would close and ‘deductions he would cut’. In your next response you deflected and in your following response your excuse was that it would be dangerous to reveal the plan because Democrats would twist i for their evil purposes. Sci-Fi world again. Republicans are the good guys and Democrats are the Evil Empire. So has it been since the 18th century in this country and so shall it ever be. Only the packaging and the labels change (old wine/new bottles).

Changing screen names and what you call a left-wing agenda (that would be anyone even slightly to the left of your right-wing agenda —you certainly haven’t convinced me that you’re center-right. So on that and your intelligence background you’ve made a “perfectly logical leap” to the conclusion that I “hate America? Am I misinterpreting something here?

——

Oh, I’m not Norm either. My life outside in the real world is too well established for me to spend time talking to myself . But that’s your problem, not mine. I explained the name-changing before to WTP. I hope you haven’t entered his sphere of influence.
If you want to leap to conclusions based on whether an agenda is left-wing or right- wing go ahead. Start with this. Part of Tom Smith’s Pennsylvania campaign for US Senate is the statement “and if they don’t pass a budget they don’t get paid”. It is notable that he’s almost single-handedly funding his campaign with $17 million dollars.
Oh. And he says pregnancy caused by rape is like having a baby born out of wedlock. And he’s using dear old mom in his ads. You’ll love the following vid. Seriously, you should watch it, though, when vids start showing up as re-runs (I’m certain I’ve seen the crony girl above at least one other time on this blog) the overall sense of watching vids on here at all becomes somewhat muddied.

The man’s got $17M to spend on a political campaign. Do you honestly think his mother having or not having Medicare matters? Whether Medicare matters to him? That it has any relevance whatsoever to his real view of the world. Or is just a political-convenience view ?

At the second presidential debate on Tuesday night, a camera caught first lady Michelle Obama clapping after moderator Candy Crowley told Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney that President Obama called the Benghazi attack an “act of terror” soon after the attack on the U.S. consulate.

Nearly all of the audible applause came from those sitting away from the actual debate, but when FOX News’ camera shot moved to a bird’s-eye view it became apparent that the only applause from the participating debate audience came from first lady Michelle Obama. Mitt Romney’s wife Ann was also sitting with the debate participants.

According to the rules both campaigns agreed to, or the memorandum of understanding (MOA), there is to be no clapping from members of the debate audience.

The rule: Article 9, Section A, Subsection 7: “All members of the debate audience will be instructed by the moderator before the debate goes on the air and by the moderator after the debate goes on the air not to applaud, speak, or otherwise participate in the debate by any means other than by silent observation, except as provided by the agreed upon rules of the October 16 town hall debate.”

Not yet-I bought it, but I’m still finishing up Swtor with Ron. I’m playing a bounty hunter and Ron is a Sith sorcerer. He is liking being evil a bit too much…which I blame on the Blood Prince. I do plan on playing it soon-how about you?